Imagine that you knew about a secret ingredient to success in your career. An ingredient that if you add it to your day-to-day life at work, you’d get promoted more, be paid more, and succeed where others fail. Sounds great, doesn’t it? But this ingredient is no secret. It’s well known and researched. And yet, most managers and HR professionals have very little information on what this ingredient is, and more importantly, they don’t know what the status of the ingredient within their organization is.

The ingredient I’m referring to is: Engagement.

The Secret: Engaged Employees

Most managers and HR professionals take for granted that employees have to be productive. Productive employees are what all businesses strive for and it’s what drives the bottom line and continual value of a company.

But how do we get there? How do you build a productive workforce? If you don’t start with the right people, you’re unlikely to succeed. But that’s only one side of the productivity coin. To really build productive teams, your employees have to be engaged.

Psychological science has several well-researched models that describe how things like motivation, happiness, “flow,” and psychological health work. More than ever before, we now understand how to motivate people, what happiness looks like and how to improve it, and why psychological health is as important as physical health. All of these factors, when collected under one banner, can be called: “engagement.”

Research on engagement and the factors that underlie it suggest that highly engaged employees tend to be:

  • More productive
  • Less likely to leave their employer
  • More likely to be promoted
  • Likely to motivate other employees and improve their engagement
  • More likely to come up with innovative solutions

Clearly having engaged employees is a worthy goal for any organization. It’s that secret ingredient that can unlock potential and productivity.

Measuring Employee Engagement

The first step to unlocking the power of engagement for your organization though is measuring it accurately. Not knowing what the state of engagement is inside your organization is like shooting in the dark. You don’t know what your aiming at or whether what you’re doing is really having any impact.

At Omnicor, we’ve built robust models and methods of measuring engagement and the factors that underlie it. We and our clients who use our systems have learnt that when it comes to engagement, shooting in the dark costs far more than the cost of accurately and scientifically measuring engagement levels. If you consider the link between productivity and engagement, it’s not that surprising.

Some of the tools we use in measuring engagement in your business include:

  • Client Satisfaction Surveys — measures whether you’re getting things right with your customers
  • Organisational Climate Surveys — measures the organisational attractiveness of your business
  • Talent Engagement Surveys — measures the engagement of your employees, and benchmarks those results using locally-developed models against other companies
  • Custom Surveys — need something measured that doesn’t exist in one of our pre-existing surveys? We’ll build an effective solution using clever, science-based thinking and our organisational knowledge.